In general, the present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and an information processing method. More particularly, the present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and an information processing method wherein and whereby typically a plurality of CPUs generate their respective instructions concurrently and transfer the generated instructions to a drawing unit in accordance with priorities assigned to the CPUs so as to allow drawing processing to be carried out by the drawing unit with a high degree of efficiency.
With larger scales of integration of LSIs achieved in recent years, a plurality of identical circuits can be laid out in parallel in one LSI, allowing the speed of processing carried out thereby to be increased. By the way, a video game system manufactured in recent years comprises a central processing unit (CPU) and a drawing unit. Receiving data representing a polygon to be displayed from a controller, the CPU carries out 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional coordinate transformation on the data and creates a list of drawing instructions used for drawing the polygon on a 2-dimensional frame buffer. The CPU then transfers the list which is referred to hereafter as a display list to the drawing unit for drawing the polygon in accordance with the display list.
However, effects of improving the throughput of a processing system by adopting a parallel processing technique are reaped more effectively for a system wherein a number of simple operations are carried out repeatedly as is the case with the drawing unit. As a consequence, the speed of processing executed by the CPU is relatively low in comparison with a parallel processing drawing unit produced in recent years. In addition, in order to reduce the amount of 3-dimensional model data, it is necessary to generate a complex graphic such as a curved surface from few pieces of vertex data (control points) each time a drawing operation is carried out. It is the CPU that has to bear the load of processing to generate such a complex graphic. As a result, there is raised a problem that the drawing processing can not be carried out with a high degree of efficiency.